


Strong Enough to Bend

by Kizmet



Series: Prelude: Putting the Dys in Functional [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Tony Stark, Drabble, Gen, Not Steve Friendly, Pre-Avengers (2012), Stubborn Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 13:04:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15972890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: The footage: the birthday party, the Congressional hearing.  It was easy to despise Tony Stark for those, and there wasn’t any need for self-reflection if those were the reason for disliking him.  Much easier to write him off for those… Than to examine what it was about Afghanistan that set Steve’s teeth on edge.





	Strong Enough to Bend

**Author's Note:**

> There's a tree out in the backyard  
> That never has been broken by the wind  
> And the reason its still standing  
> It was strong enough to bend  
>  \-- Tanya Tucker, "Strong Enough to Bend"
> 
> Just wondering, when Steve plants his tree by the river of truth... What sort of tree is it?

Steve frowned at the file in front of him. The scant facts had been patched together with speculation but the speculation seemed sound enough and didn’t pretend to be more than it was. That wasn’t what bothered him. 

The facts: That Tony Stark was taken hostage. The video; not a ransom but a demand for more money to kill him. The terrorist base; a smoking ruin, littered with corpses and the scraps of Stark Industry weapons that never should have been there. The remains of a crude lab. And Iron Man not long after. 

The speculation: What the terrorists might have asked for once they realized who their target was. That they wouldn’t have asked nicely. That they wouldn’t have give Stark access to that lab without promises of compliance. That it wasn’t coincidence or accident that Tony Stark walked out of that base alive when so many of his captors did not. 

_Steve sat in the back of a car alongside Peggy Carter being driven to the experiment that would change his life forever. It seemed fitting to him that the final stage of Project Rebirth would take place in Brooklyn. “I know this neighborhood,” he told Peggy. “I got beat up in that alley. And that parking lot. And behind that diner.”_

_“Did you have something against running away?” Peggy asked._

_“You start running they’ll never let you stop. You stand up, push back,” Steve told her with conviction. “Can’t say no forever, right?”_

Sure he’d lost every fight but every one of them had been a moral victory: No one had been able to make him back down or bend his neck. Steve looked down at the file again, the pieced together story of someone who had let his tormentors believe he’d broken. Someone who had let the bullies have the victory Steve had never once given, not even when he was small and sickly and getting beaten up in every back alley in Brooklyn. Someone who had run but only far enough to turn the tables. 

Steve remembered a flagpole even the fittest guys in his unit couldn’t climb, that no one had managed to climb in seventeen years if his Drill Sergeant could be believed. He remembered a run back to the camp that he’d known he couldn’t make and Peggy sitting in the jeep. Steve knew he was capable of thinking his way around problems but, more often than not, it had felt like a defeat. An acknowledgement that he wasn’t capable of standing up and facing his problems, his enemies, head on. Like a man. 

Steve reached past the file for the little stick that plugged into the computer he’d been loaned to watch the footage again: the drunken birthday party, the disrespectful behavior at the Congressional hearing. It was comfortable, not liking Tony Stark for those. It wasn’t necessary to parse out why the file set his teeth on edge. _Tony Stark wasn’t worth the trouble._


End file.
